5G

On the 24th October, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel and several other operators, including some that are no longer operational, will have to pay to the government within 90 days a combined more than 1.02 lakh crores in AGR (adjusted gross revenue) as spectrum usage charges and license fees.

Due to this decision cellphone plans got up to 42% costlier and if the court didn’t give Vodafone Idea more time to pay the due AGR then the company will collapse and we will only have two companies in the telecom sector- Jio and Bharti Airtel (We all know what’s happening with BSNL).

Competition in every sector is very important because it pushes companies to improve their product and give the best possible product to their customers. At the time, when the telecom sector is in crisis talking about 5G is just like talking about 5 trillion economy in the time of economic slowdown. But as the hype of 5G is getting bigger & bigger every day, today we will talk about the different aspects of 5G and how it will change our everyday life.

Every time the technical rules that define the inner workings of cellular networks changes, we get a new “generation,” or “G” of technology, meaning to reap the benefits people have to buy whole new phones, and carriers will need to install new transmission equipment to deliver the speeds they promised.

When we got 1G it was for voice calls only, but then 2G gave us text messages, 3G added that multimedia support that we can’t imagine being without, like video chats and faster speeds, and now we have 4G – which has all the features of 3G But an added bump of speeds from 14 Mbps to 100Mbps which changed the game.

5G is anticipated to give users the fastest connectivity they have ever experienced. It will be 10 to 100 times (or even more) faster than 4G which means that you can download all 8 seasons of GOT in just 1-2 minutes.

But the thing that sets 5G aside is it's crazy low latency rate which is the amount of delay between the sending and receiving of information. Now 4G tends to average about 100 to 200 milliseconds and to be fair a hundred milliseconds is fast human reaction time is about 200 to 300 milliseconds but 5G will get it down to one millisecond that's almost real-time.

5G will allow devices to communicate with each other in real-time and it can do major improvements in the responsiveness in devices that use sensors to make important decisions; like self-driving cars that need to suddenly brake, or industrial robots that can be sent to hazardous areas and be controlled remotely from anywhere in the world or better yet, anything in the healthcare field. From telemedicine, precision surgical robots, to remote surgery, or even virtual physical therapy sessions.

Network slicing is another hot feature of 5G. It is the ability to partition off segments of the 5G network with specific latency, bandwidth, and quality-of-service guarantees, that could change the underlying economics of cellular service. So, if a hospital or factory needs a dedicated wireless network with specific requirements they can use software to allocate slices without human involvement.

But 5G has one major drawback. It uses a mix of frequencies with most of the attention on the brand-new millimeter waves that are compared to the 15 to 40 centimeter long waves used by 4G and shorter waves and higher frequencies have a massive problem they don't go very far. On a 4G network, you can go 10 kilometers and barely lose signal, 5G max out on about 300 meters and it can't go through walls or even bad weather like rain.

So a new infrastructure is needed. That’s why we have to get small cell sites. Hundreds, if not thousands of lower-power base stations (outputting only 2-10 watts each) will have to be built-in and around city homes to keep the connectivity in place.

So, just like any other technology, 5G also has its pros and cons but one thing is for sure that once available, it will definitely change the world around us.

Predestination Paradox

“What if I could put him in front of you, the man that ruined your life? If I could guarantee that you'd get away with it, would you kill him?”
This is the one line that defines Predestination (2015), a movie which has all the elements, science, romance, tragedy and thrill. This movie follows a temporal agent, a futuristic enforcer, one with the responsibility to change the course of the world, plant seeds of the future by time travel.
This movie embraces the several paradoxes time travel presents itself with. The main being the bootstrap paradox which is, ‘a theoretical paradox of time travel that occurs when an object or piece of information sent back in time becomes trapped within an infinite cause-effect loop in which the item no longer has a discernible point of origin, and is said to be “uncaused” or “self-created”.’ It explores several such paradoxes which are mind intriguing and finally lead to startling conclusions.
Join the agent as he goes out to find a ‘fizzle bomber’, who is bombing cities up, to him travelling to time spanning decades and recreating his own life. Truly, as said by a barkeep in the movie, ‘truth is stranger than fiction.’
Catch the trailer : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcQacCfi_pw

Loyal Wingman

Our life is full of mistakes starting from eating unnecessary things as a kid to our first heartbreak. But what if our mistake cost someone their life? On 27th February 2019 tensions were high after IAF jets conducted airstrikes in Pakistan's Balakot on the 26th and destroyed JEMs terror camps, which was in response to JEMs attack on Indian convey that killed 40 CRPF personnel in Pulwama on 14th February. 

Pakistan tried to retaliate by sending fighter jets towards the Indian side. Unfortunately, a Mi-17 helicopter, which went to involve in a dogfight with Pakistani jets, was shot down by IAF's SPYDER (Surface-to-air Python and Derby) air defense missile killing all 6 IAF personnel on board. Not only this, at least 20 air force personnel were killed in air crashes from January to September 2019. 

With rapid development in AI and robotics technology, automation is at a tipping point. Today, robots can perform a slew of functions without considerable human intervention. Automated technologies are not only executing iterative tasks but also augmenting workforce capabilities significantly. 

And now Boeing (which is the second-largest defense contractor in the world based on 2018 revenue) is going one step further by building ‘Loyal Wingman’, in collaboration with RAAF (Royal Australian Air Force), which is a self-piloted warplane designed to work together with human-piloted aircraft.

The autonomous plane is 11 meters (38 feet) long and clean-cut, with sharp angles offset by soft curves. The look is quietly aggressive. It is designed to achieve a range of 3704 km and will carry electronic warfare systems and sensor packages for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions.

The aircraft is also designed to operate as a swarm. Many of these autonomous fighters with cheap individual sensors, for example, could fly in a “distributed antenna” geometry, collectively creating a greater electromagnetic aperture than you could get with a single expensive sensor. Such a distributed antenna could also help the system resist jamming (transmitting additional radio signals towards enemy receivers, making it difficult to detect real target signals).

The design avoids angles that might reflect radar signals straight back to the source, like a ball bouncing off the inside corner of a box. Instead, the design deflects them erratically. Payloads are hidden in the belly. Of course, if the goal is to trigger enemy air defense systems, such a plane could easily turn unstealthy (can attract attention). The design benefits from the absence of a pilot. There is no cockpit to break the line, nor a human who must be protected from the brain-draining forces of acceleration.

Setting the exact parameters of the Loyal Wingman’s autonomy—which decisions will be made by the machine and which by a human—is the main challenge. If too much money is invested in perfecting the software, the Wingman could become too expensive; too little, however, may leave it incapable of carrying out the required operations.

The need to balance capability and cost also affects how the designers can protect the aircraft against enemy countermeasures. The Wingman’s stealth and maneuverability will make it harder to hit with antiaircraft missiles that rely on impact to destroy their targets, so the most plausible countermeasures are cybertechniques that hack the aircraft’s communications, perhaps to tell it to fly home or electromagnetic methods that fry the airplane’s internal electronics.

Boeing Australia has concluded the major fuselage (the main body of an aircraft) structural assembly for the prototype of the first Loyal Wingman aircraft and is planning to conduct its first test flight later this year.

This year’s test flights should help engineers weigh trade-offs between resilience and cost. Those flights will also answer specific questions: Can the Wingman run low on fuel and decide to come home? Or can it decide to sacrifice itself to save a human pilot?

And at the heart of it all is the fundamental question facing militaries the world over: Should airpower be cheap and expendable or costly and capable?

Spider the artist

As protests over the rights of people versus the rights of oil pipelines grow more confrontational in the American Mid-West, this short story slides in with an imaginable future in which oil pipelines wend through villages and ecologically sensitive areas of Nigeria with disregard for the villagers. Artificially intelligent, large white cyber-spiders scurry up and down the pipelines fixing leaks and dismembering humans that get to close or tamper with the infrastructure.

The narrator toys with death when she routinely slips out of the hands of her abusive, alcoholic husband and hides in the long grass by the pipeline where she can watch the “ AI spiders” and practice her guitar. One particular spider stops to observe the music making. Day after day. Then one day, it produces its own musical instrument, spider - the artist;
"Zombie no go go, unless you tell am to go
Zombie!
Zombie!
Zombie no go stop, unless you tell am to stop
Zombie no go turn, unless you tell am to turn
Zombie!
Zombie no go think, unless you tell am to think"

This short story has a lot in its bag. From human characters to robots which are good and bad, claiming our imagination wrong, is a must read, available online. 

This tale appears in Okorafor’s anthology, Kabu Kabu by Prime Books. Link to the story:

http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/spider-the-artist/

Foldable Laptops

Suppose you got placed after 4 hectic years of your B.Tech (Stop imagining about it, come back to the blog ). One day you get back to your room after an early leave. You are exhausted and decide to binge watch a web series. You start watching Sacred Games season 2 and soon, you get bored by listening to the spiritual talks by Guru Ji. You slept and woke up super late. You take an auto after doing your daily chores. While sitting in the auto, you remembered that you had to send an email to an important client and, you left your phone in the room. Since there are other people also in the auto, there is no room to take out your laptop and work. At this time, you wish that if your laptop had the size of a tablet, you could have done your work easily.

At CES 2020 (Consumer Electronic Show), Lenovo unveiled the World's First Foldable laptop Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Fold, which is ready to revolutionize the world of laptops. In this blog, we will talk about the different challenges Lenovo faced while developing it and how did they overcome those challenges.

The first challenge was, of course, building a Foldable screen. Most of the screens that we see in our lives are LCD screens. They're liquid crystal displays and are typically built around a glass space. You have a glass screen or a glass backing for the LCD.

Foldable screens are made from OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diodes). One of the things that happen with an OLED screen is that the pixels, the light portion of the screen that emits light or that displays an image, is built into the screen itself. So the LEDs are on the actual screen technology instead of being behind it projecting through a glass pane. What happens with flexible displays is that they have this OLED screen technology that's being printed on a thin layer of plastic and, when you've got that thin layer of plastic you can do all kinds of things with it, you can bend it or shape it in different ways.

Within the screen itself, there are four to five layers that bend. There's the layer of the screen itself, the supporting metal layer under each side, and a second layer that goes all the way across with a special laser-cut folding area in the middle. The entire screen had to be supported by two precision-machined carbon fiber plates.

There's also a four-part hinge that has interlocking arms and will make sure that the pieces fit well together when you have it open or bent.

Lenovo had to completely design a new type of cooling system from the ground up. So there is a fan and a heat sink as well as a heat spreader that sandwich the entire motherboard to keep it cool, reliable, and have a good user experience.

Now the X1 Fold runs on regular Windows 10, which isn't designed for these kinds of foldable screens. So Lenovo had to give you the ability to, for example, pin certain apps on different sides of the screen, and there's a little icon in the taskbar that you can click to do this. If you use the device in portrait mode when it's unfolded you can click the same icon and that gives you the option to bring up an on-screen keyboard, and then if you fold the laptop on top of each other it's like you have a mini laptop with a touchscreen keyboard. 

Or you can use the wireless-Bluetooth keyboard, put it on top of the onscreen keyboard, and then you have a miniature laptop with little keys. Alternatively, you can unfold the laptop to its full screen, and use the kickstand on the back, and use the keyboard wirelessly.

There have been some pretty high profile failures in this product category already (a recent one was Samsung Galaxy Fold), so there's a reason to be skeptical, but the company is confident in its design. There are some neat touches too like there's a slight crease in the display when you fold it open, but it's not super visible, and although there's a gap when you fold it together, between the two sections of the screen that gets filled up by the keyboard which is a nice touch.

 

The problem with experimental tech products is that companies charge money for them, and this one is gonna cost quite a lot (around 1,78,217 Indian rupees). But as the competition increases, the product will become affordable and will change the world of laptops.

I ORIGINS

We’ve heard the quote, “Eyes are the window to our souls”, well, what are souls?

That’s the sort of line we could hear from the lead of the movie, I-Origins, Ian Grey. A scientist who is a core believer in data and facts is forced to re-evaluate his entire belief system when he falls in love. Being polar opposites, they question the age old debate of science v/s spiritualism.

They say, every one of us has one thing unique in us, our eyes. What happens when we die, is it assigned to someone else? Is rebirth actually possible? Is it possible that throughout the millennia that humankind has existed, no two people have had the same pair of eyes? And if they do, is it a mere coincidence or are the two people similar in some way?

Ian goes from dismissing rebirth, spirituality as irrationality; to actually finding evidence that proves all of it through the one thing he knows best, eyes. He is ultimately forced to ask himself : What if something spiritual disapproves of his scientific beliefs?

Science and faith can be seen to co-evolve in a beautiful way. Ian and Sofie represent science and spirituality respectively. Like how spirituality can explain soulmates as ‘I feel we are connected from past lives’; science explains as, ‘When the big bang happened, all the atoms in the universe, they were all smashed together into one little dot that exploded outward. So my atoms and your atoms were certainly together then, and, who knows, probably smashed together several times in the last 13.7 billion years. So my atoms have known your atoms and they've always known your atoms. My atoms have always loved your atoms.’

Catch this movie : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk4briOLrTQ

Hyperloop

Reaching from one place to another without delay has always been a dream for us. Specially in India, where 23 million passengers (which is equivalent to the entire population of Australia) daily travel by trains (Acc. To Business Standard in 2015). I will tell you the condition of Indian Railways with the help of an incident.

My friend’s sister's wedding was in Kanpur couple of years ago. His relative, who came from Mumbai, wanted to see Taj Mahal. After enquiring he came to know that it takes around 5-6 hours to reach Agra from Kanpur by train. He thought that if he took a train around 8-9 a.m., he would reach Agra around 3-4 p.m. max and would come back to Kanpur the next day in the midnight, after taking a train around 8-9p.m. But, the irony was that he didn’t know which trains were good or bad in terms of being delayed. And unfortunately he took Toofan Express, which is usually delayed around 5-6 hours daily. It took him around 12 hours to reach Agra and since he had nowhere to stay, hence he had to spent the entire night sleeping in the general waiting room. So, will our dream ever become a reality?

In July 2019, Indian government gave the final nod for the construction of Hyperloop train built by Virgin Hyperloop One, between Mumbai and Pune. Billed as the fastest way to cross the surface of the earth, Hyperloop represents the greatest leap in transport infrastructure for generations. With passengers sitting in pods that travel at airline speed through pressurised tubes using electric propulsion and magnetic levitation, the concept promises to slash journey times between major cities from several hours to a matter of minutes. 

Hyperloop was first conceived in 2012 by Tesla and SpaceX founder, Elon Musk. In a white paper released the following year, Musk set out his vision for a futuristic, super high-speed transportation system that would see passenger pods move through a partial vacuum in steel tubes - addressing the two key factors that slow down conventional vehicles: friction and air resistance. It has four key features-

1- The passenger capsules aren't propelled by air pressure like in vacuum tubes but by electromagnetic motors similar to once featured in Tesla cars and rail guns it's aimed to travel at a top speed of 760 miles per hour rocketing between Los Angeles and San Francisco and around ½ hour.

2- The tube tracks do have a vacuum but they're not completely free of air instead they have low pressure air inside of them most things moving through air tubes will end up compressing the air in front thus creating a cushion of air that slows the object down but the Hyperloop will feature a compressor fan in the front of the capsule the compressor fan can redirect air to the back of the capsule for additional propulsion.

3- But mostly the air will be sent to the air bearings their ski like paddles that levitate the capsules above the surface of the tube to reduce friction.

4- The tube track is designed to be immune to weather and Earthquakes. It's also designed to be self-powering and unobstructed. The pillars raising the tubes above the ground have a small footprint and can sway in the case of an Earthquake. Each of the tube sections can move around flexibly if the terrain ships because there isn't a constant track that the capsules rely on and solar panels on the top of the track supply power to the periodic motors.

The advantages of Hyperloop are considerable. Like train stations, Hyperloop stations, called portals, are planned to be located within inner city areas with easy links to existing transport infrastructure. This gives hyperloop systems a distinct advantage over air travel, where airports tend to be located beyond city limits with fewer accessibility options.

Another clear benefit is its speed. If hyperloop could significantly reduce the travel time between cities, it could be possible to live in a completely different city or part of
the country from where you work. This opens up a wide range of housing and employment opportunities with people no longer restricted to have living close to where they work.

With speeds rivalling aircrafts, Hyperloop has the potential to completely revolutionise the way we live, work and travel.

Terraformation

Terraformation

Into the infinite,
Ready to explore,
Listening to the cacophony of explosions,
Recontouring universal folklore!

The universe we live in may not be the only one out there. There could be other galaxies besides our own, where all the choices we made in this life, played out in alternate realities. This is the concept of a parallel universe and a facet of the astronomical theory of the Multiverse. 

The Mediocrity Principle suggests that planets like earth should be common in the universe. Multiverse should have Earth analogs.

Earth analog is a planet or moon with environmental conditions similar to those found on earth. Exoplanets like Gliese 667Cc, Kepler 22b, Kepler 69c, Kepler 62f, Kepler 186f, Kepler 452b, etc. are Earth analogs.

These planets are situated more than 1000 light-years away from us and are capable of sustaining life. The pristine expanse of darkness is home to coruscating star, craggy planets, incandescent meteors, dazzling galaxies, devouring black holes, glittering cosmic dust and what not? In the true, eternal and unique beauty of cosmos lies all the secrets untold.

We can create Earth analogs by TERRAFORMATION. Terraformation is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying the atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology of a planet or any heavenly body to be similar to the environment of Earth to make it sustainable. The same technology was used in the movie STAR TREK, which gave birth to a new planet 'GENESIS'. 

What if we can use the same process and Mars would become home to living spirits? Unfortunately to date terraforming the red planet is a hypothetical process. With advancements in technology, we can establish hospitable conditions. 

The very idea of colonizing Mars is fascinating and bizarre. 

"NUKE MARS" is on Elon Musk's wish list. This concept is apparently still bouncing around in Musk's head and he is leaving no stone unturned to make it happen. 

Nuking Mars would melt the polar ice caps and release gases that would thicken the atmospheric layer, maintaining the optimum temperature. Other important factors should also be kept in mind while transforming the inhospitable Martian atmosphere to sustain life.


Beyond the mesmerizing beauty of cosmos lies uncharted territories to be explored.